Anthony E. Alvarezhttp://anthonyalvarez.us
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I am teaching at a free 1.5 day weekend workshop geared towards introducing women to Ruby on Rails. The goal of the course is to help women build their first database driven website. In this workshop, we’ll take you through building a complete web application using Ruby on Rails. By the end of the day, you’ll have an application that connects to a database and reads and writes information. This workshop will be focused on developing web apps and programming in Ruby.

Why learn Ruby on Rails?

As one of the most powerful ways to quickly develop web applications, Ruby on Rails has a high relevance and demand in today’s marketplace. Companies like Airbnb, Fab.com, Hulu, and even Codecademy, have built their products using the Rails framework.

3 Reasons Why You Should Learn Ruby As Your First Programming Language

Learning Ruby is a stepping stone to Ruby on Rails

If you’re currently working within the software industry or startup community, chances are you’ve heard of Ruby on Rails (often shortened to just Rails). Rails is a software framework for creating web applications.

Many students new to programming aren’t sure what the difference is between Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a language. Ruby on Rails is a framework that uses and depends on the Ruby programming language. Think of a framework as a collection of pre-written code to help programmers. In this case, the Rails framework is a collection of pre-written code to help programmers make websites and web applications.

Still confused? Think of making a sandwich. You simply add a slice of meat, cheese, and lettuce to two slices of bread. But where did the bread come from? It’s easier to get pre-sliced bread from the grocery store instead of baking our own bread using flour and water. In this case, the Ruby programming language is flour and water. Pre-sliced bread is the Ruby on Rails framework.

Learning Ruby is a prerequisite to learning Ruby on Rails. You’ll be one step closer to creating web applications like Twitter, Yellow Pages, Hulu, or Groupon.

Ruby knowledge is in demand

The TIOBE Programming Community Index lists Ruby as the 11th most popular programming language as of the time of writing this article. Although popularity is a good thing, what’s better is demand. Currently, Ruby is experiencing incredible growth in demand.

Demand for Ruby programmers is most likely tied to the Ruby on Rails framework, which launched the programming language into mainstream development in 2004. Employers are building their websites using Ruby on Rails. They need Ruby developers to maintain their code bases.

The demand for Ruby also exists outside of Ruby on Rails. Ruby is increasingly becoming common within DevOps roles. Wondering what DevOps is? A website or web application with huge amounts of traffic will usually require hundreds of computers to run on, called servers. DevOps engineers ensures the reliability and efficiency of those servers. DevOps engineers also automate the deployment of servers, so websites can quickly handle large surges of traffic. Ruby is a popular programming language for DevOps frameworks like Puppet and Chef.

Ruby has a huge and useful ecosystem

A programming language’s ecosystem is important for several reasons:

Existing code that you can leverage — Ruby has pre-written frameworks and libraries like Ruby on Rails and Chef. You can use this pre-written code for your own projects. Why spend time reinventing the wheel when someone else has already done it for you? Ruby even has its own system to manage frameworks and libraries, called RubyGems. There are currently over 60,000 libraries to choose from!

Documentation — instructions play a huge role in every developer’s life. As you’re working on your project, you’ll constantly be searching through documentation. First time connecting to a database? The go to starting place is documentation. When you’re coding, there will be a lot of “first times” where you’ll need access to good documentation.

Learning resources — Ruby has a large amount of resources to choose from. There’s plenty of books, screencasts, in-person courses, and even developer bootcamps dedicated to learning Ruby. There are even free tutorials scattered throughout the web, like free e-book, below. Keep reading until end of article for details.

Community — Stuck on a programming problem or have a question? Find a Ruby mailing list, chat room, or web forum and ask away! The Ruby community is filled with generous developers who enjoy helping out. Be sure to contribute once you’re more experienced. There are even Ruby User Groups, where developers interested in Ruby meet in person to discuss and learn from each other.

How to start learning Ruby

I hope I’ve sold you on why Ruby is an ideal first programming language! As I mentioned, Ruby has an excellent community and extensive amount of learning resources. You can learn from books or online courses, but remember, the best way to learn programming is by getting your hands dirty! As you’re reading books or taking a course, start coding on your own programming projects. You’ll learn best when you’re solving real world problems.

Is Ruby on Rails a Good Choice for Your Website?

Ruby on Rails (often referred to as just “Rails”) is a framework for building websites that can make it more affordable to create and maintain your site, while simultaneously offering improved performance and faster development times.

In general, Rails gives you more “bang for your buck” as a business owner, without sacrificing flexibility or performance. We have also found, however, that there are some projects for which Ruby on Rails is not the best choice. Below are some guidelines for determining whether Ruby on Rails would be a good choice for your project.

The benefits of Ruby on Rails

Overall, as a business owner, the three largest benefits you can expect with Ruby on Rails are:

Quicker launch. Sites that would traditionally take 12 weeks to build can commonly be launched inside of 6 weeks with Ruby on Rails. This time savings results from a few factors: a leaner code-base (fewer lines of redundant code), a modular design (re-using existing components rather than building everything from scratch), and the availability of existing plugins (again, reducing the need to build features from scratch).

Easier changes. After site launch, future modifications to your site (e.g., adding new features, making changes to the data model) can be made more quickly, for the same reasons noted above.

More cost-effective. Because of the speed with which Rails sites can be built and modified, you spend less money to create and maintain the website — without compromising the quality, performance, or scalability of your site.

In summary, while building Rails websites isn’t “cheap” but for larger sites you do stand to gain a much better return on your investment by using Rails.

When to use Ruby on Rails

Rails is an ideal solution if your site falls into one or more of the following categories:

E-commerce. Most e-commerce sites benefit tremendously from Rails’ user-friendly features and modular approach to site development. We can also include features that you would normally only find in high-end e-commerce suites, such as bulk uploads and updates (for product descriptions and photos, extremely handy when you have thousands of products), custom pricing algorithms, and on-the-fly photo resizing/cropping (especially handy for making product thumbnails for browse pages).

Membership sites. Membership and social networking options are pretty much “baked” into Rails. A variety of plugins are available to solve just about any social networking challenge you can think of.

Content management. If the purpose of your site is to present thousands of articles, audio files, or other database-friendly content, Rails is a great solution because of the ease with which users will be able to navigate the site, and the ease with which you will be able to upload and manage the content.

Custom database solutions. More and more of our new projects are custom solutions requiring a novel database structure to support a creative new business model. In most cases, Rails is an ideal way to realize build these solutions at a fraction of the usual time and expense.

When NOT to use Ruby on Rails

On the other hand, your site likely will not be well suited to Ruby on Rails if it is:

A “brochure” site. Many small business owners taking their first steps on the web are looking for a brochure-style website that makes a good first impression, provides background and contact information for the company, and enables the business owner to update the website himself. For this kind of website, a better solution than Rails would be a WordPress-driven content management system. If this is what you need, there’s no reason to bear the expense of creating a Ruby on Rails site.

Limited to a budget. Rails sites offer real advantages once they are set up, but getting the initial framework in place takes some work.

A blog-centric site. Ruby on Rails makes it easy to add a blog to a larger web site (e.g., an e-commerce or social networking site). But if your site is first and foremost a blog, then Rails is probably not the best choice; there are other solutions that offer more advanced features with less overhead. You would be better served by utilizing WordPress, for example, as your base site.

Event Host:

Location:

Blue Apron

40 West 23rd St
5th Floor
New York, NY 10010

Transportation

Take the N/R/Q/W, 1/2 or 6, to 23rd St.

Food and Drinks

Food and drinks will be provided!

Dinner will be provided for Installfest Friday night, and breakfast, lunch and snacks will be provided on Saturday.

We will do our best to accommodate vegan and gluten-free requests.

After party

We will have a short party after the event with light refreshments sponsored by Blue Apron.

Please join us and network with other volunteers and attendees!

Student Details

All students need to bring their own laptop and power cord.

Since bandwidth is usually at a premium at the Installfest, please head to our Downloads page on the Docs site to download everything you need for your Operating System.

PLEASE NOTE: Installfest is required for participation in this workshop. We’ll meet up on Friday to install all of the software you need, and then spend Saturday learning and writing code. Programmers of all skill levels are welcome. We will have different classes separated by experience level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced).

As a native new Yorker. I remember my uncle telling me as a child, that Second Avenue Subway would be finished when I became an adult. Well. the grand opening has finally arrived today.

Gov. Mario Cuomo arrived at the opening 96 Street Station of the Second Avenue Subway line. He gave a speech before going into the subway. While on the initial ride, he continued the speech on the subway car’s public address system..

There are three new stations and one station that is enlarged.

96 street

86 Street

72 Street

Lexington and 63 Street, improved and upgraded but not a new station

The new stations are cookie cut. Almost exactly the same. I wish New York Subway system had public bathroom like other major subway systems.

I love the new line because it goes to important shopping centers and tourist sites while reducing commute times by 15 minutes. The new 96 street station is so convenient compared to the 6 line. Because Second Avenue residents have to talk up a hill in order to reach Lexington Avenue subway line.

Roosevelt Island

Carnegie Hall

Times Square

Herald Square

Union Square

Chinatown

The new subway line shortens trip times from Upper East side by about 15 minutes.

Residential housing Construction at Upper East side is booming. The new subway stations are sorely needed.

Presenting at WordCamp NYC Meetup from 6PM.in Microsoft Headquarters New York City.

This talk will explain the features, benefits and advantages of Vagrant, why it is so awesome and how you can get up and running quickly. Vagrant is a great piece of software that creates reproducible and portable virtual machines which can be used as web servers for local WordPress testing environments. Vagrant is a tool for managing virtual machines – creating a programmatic way create and configure virtual machines that mimic an application’s production environment.

I’ve collected a few WordPress-related Vagrant resources that will help you get started. Will discuss many of the different vagrant boxes used to create a portable WordPress environment that are cross-platform compatible and easily to be deployed to almost any live environment.

For those who could not attend, please see slides below. When there are questions, please contact me to receive more free resources which includes a Vagrant for WordPress Developers quick start guide among others.

Free Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women in New York. Photo credit: Together Visuals

This workshop focus will be on developing functional web apps and programming in Ruby. Held on September 9 and 10th at The New York Code + Design Academy located in financial district of lower Manhattan.

RailsBridge NYC works to increase diversity in tech by putting on awesome free events.

Workshop Description

Intended for women who are interested in learning Ruby on Rails. Men are welcome to come if you find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails and come together.

In this workshop, we’ll take you through building a complete web application using Ruby on Rails. By the end of the day, you’ll have an application that connects to a database and reads and writes information. Please note that Installfest is required for participation in this workshop. We’ll meet up on Friday to install all of the software you need, and then spend Saturday learning and writing code. Programmers of all skill levels are welcome. We will have different classes separated by experience level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). Review curriculum materials.

Address:

We’re trying something new!

Been to our workshop before? We’re switching our workshops and experimenting with a new type of Installfest that will use a cutting edge technique of local development using virtual machines instead of a normal environmental install and set up. Therefore it’s extremely important that if you sign up to attend both the Installfest and the entire workshop the next day.

Giving a talk at WordCamp NYC 2016 on Sunday, July 17th from 12:50. This talk will explain the features, benefits and advantages of Vagrant, why it is so awesome and how you can get up and running quickly. Vagrant is a great piece of software that creates reproducible and portable virtual machines which can be used as web servers for local WordPress testing environments. Vagrant is a tool for managing virtual machines – creating a programmatic way create and configure virtual machines that mimic an application’s production environment.

WordCamp NYC 2016 is happening July 15th to 17th. It is hosted at the United Nations during OpenCamp, a week of events organized by different Open Source projects. I’m very excited to see how OpenCamp will bring different Open Source communities together to foster conversation and hopefully we can learn from each other.

I’ve collected a few WordPress-related Vagrant resources that will help you get started. Will discuss many of the different vagrant boxes used to create a portable WordPress environment that are cross-platform compatible and easily to be deployed to almost any live environment.

For those who could not attend, please see slides below. When there are questions, please contact me to receive more free resources which includes a Vagrant for WordPress Developers quick start guide among others.

Without the appropriate information you may experience difficulty passing through the United Nations security and accessing the facility because WordCamp NYC is going to be at the United Nations this year (cool, right?) you’ll want to show up a little earlier than usual due to the extra security. Absolutely, definitely, 100% refer to their security guidelines.

Getting to WordCamp

The first thing you’ll need to do is pick up your badge at First Avenue between 45th and 46th Street. As a result of the UN requirements for security passes, we’ve had to allow extra time to get through security and have made several adjustments to the schedule. Please ensure that you have reviewed the online version.

So arrive EARLY! Plan on 30 minutes to get through Security. We are doing our best to make the process as simple as possible. Bring a photo ID and look for WCNYC Volunteers on the plaza at First Avenue and 45th Street. We’ll be obvious, get in line and we’ll set you up to get through security. You will need to put your bag (and yourself) through security, but it’s no worse than any airport.

The United Nations Headquarters is located in the heart of New York City on 1st Avenue between 42nd and 48th Street. This 18-acre site has been declared international territory and belongs to the 193 Member States of the United Nations.
Address: United Nations Secretariat Building, 405 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017.

Developing locally is one of the best things that can happen to web developers. Not only does it let you dispense with upload/download times, you can create as many projects as you want, work with real domains locally and generally speed up everything you do.

The presentation will be given on 2016-07-10 from 10:00 to 11:00 at Rails Camp NYC at the United Nations Secretariat Building, 405 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017.

Vagrant is a programmatic way create and configure virtual machines that mimic an application’s production environment. I will show you how to have a working local version of Ruby on Rails with vagrant. Which you can edit files locally and they will automatically be pushed to your VM through shared folders with no delay.

When you’re done working for the day, simply type $vagrant halt to suspend your VM and type in $vagrant up to resume it. The procedure was used successfully to deploy virtual machines to a group students at a workshop to teach women how to code their first database driven website using Ruby on Rails in New York in May 2016. Where I was an teaching a class of advanced students.

RailsCamp is a community-run Rails Conference occurring as part of Open Camps; the world’s largest mission-driven open source conference, with 6,000+ attendees joining for 25+ conferences & events, featuring 400+ sessions on dozens of open source technologies.

Open Camps is organized in collaboration with the United Nations’s Open Source Innovation Initiative (Unite Open Source). It aims to break down barriers to technology innovation through open source governance, communities and collaboration.

Open Camps is a mission-driven collection of open source technology conferences & events.

Open Camps will be one of the largest open source conferences in the world, as we host 6,000+ developers at 25+ conferences & events, featuring hundreds of sessions on dozens of technologies.

The presentation will be given on 2016-07-10 from 10:00 to 11:00 at Rails Camp NYC at the United Nations Secretariat Building, 405 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017.

When you’re just starting out, the tech world can feel pretty intimidating. That’s why open Slack groups are so ideal for tech beginners: You can get career advice, coding help, and general support without ever leaving your chair. Even better? You’ll meet mentors and friends from all across the world—and I probably don’t need to tell you that having a network can make all the difference.

To help you figure out which Slack groups to join (there’s a ton), I’ve rounded up the best communities for those new to web development.
These groups meet a couple criteria:

Active: If there’s not a fairly regular stream of conversation, you probably won’t get much use from the community. Having a ton of members isn’t necessary, but having involved members is.

Collaborative: There’s nothing wrong with the occasional self-promotion. However, if everyone’s saying, “Check out my app!” and no one’s actually, well, checking out the apps, that’s no good. All of the communities on this list are filled with members that give just as much as they get.

Organized: While open Slack groups are usually pretty casual informals, having an organized leader is crucial. He or she will arrange meetups, introduce new channels and archive old ones, and keep the activity going.

Respectful: A general attitude of respect, humility, and kindness is crucial! You’ll never want to ask questions if you’re worried about the reaction you’ll get.

Without further ado, here are my top picks.

#devchat
Anyone who’s interested in programming is welcome in #devchat. Since there’s no restrictions on language, framework, experience level, or location, you’ll find a great mix of people.

Thanks to the variety, there’s also a ton of different channels you can join. Use Python? Join the Python channel. Want to discuss Flask or Django? Those have their own channels as well. With more than 55 options, you can easily find your niche.
Plus, #devchat members are friendly and helpful, making this group a good resource for when you’re stuck.

Ruby Developers
If you’re interested in talking about Ruby or Ruby on Rails, Ruby Developers will be right up your alley. As far as open Slack communities go, it’s relatively small: Just over 1,500 people belong, and there are only nine channels.
One of those channels, #beginners_and_mentors, is especially perfect if you’re looking for advice or feedback. Any time someone has a question, multiple users typically jump in with suggestions. The #rails channel sees a lot of discussion as well.

NYCtech: a well-moderated forum for New York’s tech community.
NYC Devs: along similar lines, this Slack group is for developers in the city of New York.

EmberJS: more than 5,700 people use this Slack group to talk about Ember.js features, architecture, and best practices. – See more at: http://blog.flatironschool.com/the-11-best-slack-groups-for-new-programmers/#sthash.kOqI5o7V.dpuf

PHP-UserGroup: a community of PHP users across the world. – See more at: http://blog.flatironschool.com/the-11-best-slack-groups-for-new-programmers/#sthash.kOqI5o7V.dpuf

The NYC Web Development Fellowship is a 22-week training program designed to equip New Yorkers with the skills necessary to launch careers in web development. This iteration of the Fellowship serves foreign-born New Yorkers who are authorized to work in the United States.

The Fellowship is an intensive program designed to train New Yorkers with no prior coding experience to become production-ready web developers.

The Fellowship is full time. All applicants must be able to make the full 22-week commitment. Because the program focuses heavily on collaboration, Fellows are required to be on campus Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm. Many Fellows also choose to complete additional work on campus over the weekends.
The NYC Web Development Fellowship offers The Flatiron School’s immersive program at no cost. Lunch and MetroCards will be provided. Only 36 students will be selected for the class. Applicants must meet all eligibility requirements and go through a competitive screening process.

Eligibility Requirements:

After a competitive application process, 36 Fellows will be admitted into the class beginning June 20, 2016. All admitted Fellows must commit to being on campus from 9am to 6pm, Monday — Friday (dates subject to change).

Won a scholarship to attend a 16 weeks intensive program to develop highly sought-after skills in DevOps, cloud and server administration sponsored by Microsoft.

In 2015, President Obama announced the TechHire Initiative to create pathways to quality, well-paying tech jobs nationwide. In the associated White House announcement, the Tech Jobs Academy concept was identified as a model. Later that year, 282 New Yorkers applied to participate. This pilot program served twenty-five motivated New Yorkers.

Finally, in 2016, Microsoft, the Mayor’s Tech Talent Pipeline, and the New York City College of Technology (commonly known as City Tech) delivered the intensive 16 week pilot program, empowering people with in-demand, life-changing tech skills. Over the past handful of months, participants studied cloud and server administration and supplemented those technical skills with career development and interpersonal training.

As a member of the fist graduating cohort, we did project and lab work to build out private, public and hybrid clouds using Windows Server 2012r2 and Azure from scratch. Spent 16 weeks developing highly sought-after skills in cloud and server administration.

This program is a collaboration between Microsoft, the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline and the City University of New York (CUNY). In its pilot year, these partners have joined together to launch Tech Jobs Academy at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology.

Been teaching Ruby on Rails workshop for past three years. The focus will be on developing functional web apps and programming in Ruby.

About Workshop

This workshop is intended to reach out to women who are interested in learning Ruby on Rails. Men are welcome to come if you find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails and come together.

In this workshop, we’ll take you through building a complete web application using Ruby on Rails. By the end of the day, you’ll have an application that connects to a database and reads and writes information. Please note that Installfest is required for participation in this workshop. We’ll meet up on Friday to install all of the software you need, and then spend Saturday learning and writing code. Programmers of all skill levels are welcome. We will have different classes separated by experience level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced).

Class Levels for Ruby on Rails

Somewhat New to Programming

You may have used the terminal a little — to change directories, for instance

You might have done an online programming tutorial or two

You don’t have a lot of experience with Rails

You know what a method is

You aren’t totally clear on how a request gets from the browser to your app

Some Rails Experience

You’re comfortable using the terminal, but not necessarily a Power User

You have a general understanding of a Rails app’s structure, perhaps from a prior workshop or tutorial

You know how to define a method in Ruby

You have a decent handle on Ruby arrays and hashes

Orange Other Programming Experience

You’re proficient in another language and understand general programming concepts, like collections and scope.